Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 23:40:25 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: jdike@addtoit.com, blaisorblade_spam@yahoo.it,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Inclusion of UML in 2.6.8
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Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm looking at quilt
> 
> Good tool.
> 
> It's a bit like a loaded gun with no safety. You will learn a few new
> ways to shoot your foot off, and become good at first aid.  You will
> want someway to keep personal revision history of your patches, to aid
> in such repair work.  CVS or RCS or local bitkeeper or (for ancient
> hackers like me) raw SCCS or some such.  Quilt handles the patches, but
> in and of itself has nothing to do with preserving history.
> 
> All software is divided into two parts - the concrete and the fluid.
> 
> Once something is accepted into the main kernel, it's concrete.  You can
> never go back - you can only layer fixes on top.  Bitkeeper rules for
> this stuff.
> 
> But work in progress, for which oneself is still the primary source, is
> fluid.  You can slice and dice and redo it, and indeed you want to, to
> get the best patch set.  Quilt and friends rule for this stuff.

Good description, that.  quilt is a grown-up version of patch-scripts, and
is tailored to what I do, and to what distributors do: maintain a series of
diffs against a monolithic tree which someone else maintains.

> Conclusion - use Quilt (with your favorite personal version control) on
> top of Bitkeeper.

yup.  I use patch-scripts+CVS in the way which you describe.

> Question - what tools are available for convenient patch set submission?
> Composing multiple, related email sets in a GUI emailer is a bit tedious
> and error prone.  It's an obvious candidate for scripting.

patch-scripts has the "patch-bomb" script, which would presumably work OK
for quilt - it would need a little tweaking.

	http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/patch-scripts-0.18/
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